THE 2014 MULTILEVEL MODELING CONFERENCE T
he Center for Latent Variable Research’s (CILVR) conference, “Advances in Multilevel Modeling for Educational Research,” held in November 2014, was a resounding success, bringing together statistical researchers from across the nation and around the globe. Keynote speaker Dr. Sophia Organized by Measurement, Statistics, Rabe-Hesketh and Evaluation (EDMS) faculty members Dr. Laura Stapleton and Dr. Jeff Harring with Dr. Natasha Beretvas of the University of Texas at Austin, the conference was sponsored by Optimal Solutions Group LLC, an economic and policy analysis research and consulting firm based in College Park, the Society of Multivariate Dr. Laura Stapleton Experimental Psychology (SMEP), and Pearson Research. Multilevel modeling has become increasingly popular among educational practitioners and researchers as a way to account for nested sampling designs that often accompany data collection in classrooms, schools, and districts. Dr. Jeff Harring However, the practical realities of educational environments, the instability of attributes being measured, and the vagaries of the learners themselves sometimes obscure the visibility of nested data structures – groups of students in classrooms, for example. While researchers have successfully used the basic multilevel model for some time and sophistications have emerged in recent years, the field must progress in order to keep up with the many complex analytic conditions encountered in practice, such as attrition, changing cluster membership, partial clustering, and lack of invariance across clusters. The 2014 conference sought to sustain this progress by building on CILVR’s success with previous conferences – on mixture modeling in 2006 and longitudinal modeling in 2010 – by inviting renowned methodologists to present state-of-the-art multilevel analytic methods for improving educational effectiveness. Attendees arrived from
24
ENDEAVORS | COLLEGE OF EDUCATION
universities throughout the United States, as well as Canada and Europe. The keynote speaker, Professor Sophia Rabe-Hesketh of the University of California, Berkeley, lectured on methods for avoiding omitted-variable bias. Other topics ranged from handling measurement error to aspects of modeling particular to longitudinal studies, including the potential effects of kindergarten teachers on long-term outcomes. Panelists from the University of Maryland included Drs. Stapleton and Harring, Drs. Ji Seung Yang, Hong Jiao, and Tracy Sweet, and current EDMS doctoral students Qiwen Zheng and Daniel Lee, as well as Dr. Chao Xie, a program graduate who is now a psychometrician at American Institutes for Research. Dr. Joop Hox traveled all the way from the University of Utrecht, in the Netherlands, to talk about issues with incomplete multilevel data sets. Pearson and SMEP awarded travel grants to thirteen students from as far away as the University of British Columbia and the University of Oxford for their poster presentations. “I was honored to attend and participate in the Multilevel Modeling Conference, and learn from such talented graduate students and senior scholars. Pearson’s Research & Innovation Network is focused on finding solutions to the thorniest problems in educational policy and practice, and this conference provided many new avenues for applying cutting-edge methodologies to reach those solutions.” Matthew N. Gaertner, Ph.D. Senior Research Scientist, Pearson
The University of Maryland was ideally situated, geographically, for this gathering, attended by over 130 academics in all. For the first time, CILVR made the conference proceedings available via live streaming. Participants in Australia, South America, and China watched live presentations, which were also archived for later viewing. By all accounts, this adventure in technology was very well received. And the day before the conference officially convened, CILVR sponsored a one-day workshop in cross-classified multilevel models, taught by Dr. Beretvas. As with previous conferences, each of the thirteen featured speakers will contribute a chapter to a new volume in the CILVR Series on Latent Variable Methodology, edited by EDMS faculty and published by Information Age.